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Why Change Control Is Your Friend

If you’ve been working in a small company that’s grown into a larger
company or if you’ve moved from a smaller to a larger company, you’ve
probably run into change control. Change control is
the means whereby a company limits the changes that are made to the
network (or anything, for that matter) until they are understood and
scheduled. If you want to upgrade a router with change control active, you
need to submit a request. The request then needs to be approved, at which
point the change might be scheduled. In some companies, a single person
approves or denies change requests. In other companies, committees review
every request. I’ve seen companies where the change-control committee
meets only on, say, Tuesdays. If your change is denied, you have to wait
until the next Tuesday for an alternative change to be considered.

Scheduling changes is one of those things that seems to make
engineers a bit nutty. Why should you have to wait for a team of people
who don’t understand what you’re doing to tell you it’s OK to do it? Why
waste time if you know you can fix a problem with a single command that
won’t hurt anything? To engineers, change control can seem like a waste of
time and energy that does nothing but interfere with their ability to get
work done.

Over the years, I’ve held many positions, ranging from junior engineer to director of a large consulting company to head of my own business. During those years, I’ve learned a few things about how businesses ...

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